16
“I thought Lily was running away with Virgil Nash when she got killed. Shouldn’t they have blamed him?” I ask, remembering that this was the Merling twins’ point of view.
“They thought that Vera drove Lily away and that if they hadn’t argued she wouldn’t have tried to cross the clove in the middle of a snowstorm. They would have nothing to do with Vera or the colony after Lily died. I heard them talking sometimes about how intolerant and exacting Vera could be—how she ran the colony—and then the school—like a dictator. In the years after they left the school, neither if my aunts was ever asked to speak or teach a class there.”
“That’s too bad,” I say, closing the album. “In Vera’s notebooks she says that she hoped that the potter’s kiln would be a ‘communal hearth’ for the colony, and Lily spoke fondly of them in her journal.” I blush remembering what she’d actually written: that the sounds coming from their bedroom sounded like the cooing of doves. It’s not my embarrassment that Beatrice notices, though.
“Lily’s journal? You’ve read Lily’s journal?” she asks, her eyes wide with amazement.
“Just the first twenty pages or so. I stopped to read some of Vera’s notebooks—”
“But where did you get it?”
I realize that I shouldn’t have mentioned the journal, but it’s too late now. “I found it in the cottage … Fleur-de-Lis. That’s where I’m living….” I stop, noticing how agitated the old woman has become. Two bright pink spots have appeared on her cheeks and her eyes look feverish. She’s twisting the dishtowel in her hands. “Why is that so strange?”
“Because Lily’s journal disappeared after her death. Ivy St. Clare came here to ask Ada and Dora if they knew anything about what happened to it. I remember it because Dora, who never raised her voice to me once in forty years, screamed at Ivy to ‘get out and never come back.’ The aunts found me later hiding in a closet and Dora told me she was sorry for raising her voice, but that when a person accused someone you loved of stealing, you really had to stick up for her.”
“So you think Ivy St. Clare accused Ada of stealing Lily’s journal?”
“She must have. And to think it was in the cottage all along. Right under Ivy’s nose!” A ripping sound draws both our attention to the dish-towel in Beatrice’s hands. She’s torn it clean in half.
“But she didn’t know about it because it was hidden.”
“She should have looked more thoroughly before she accused my aunt of stealing.” Beatrice carefully folds the torn dishcloth into a small neat square. Her hands are shaking. “My aunts would have loved to have had a look at that journal. I heard them say once that if they did have Lily’s journal they might know why Lily left that night….” Her voice trails off and an abstracted expression comes over the blue eyes that seemed so sharp a moment ago. Then she shakes herself. “Have you found out anything from the journal about why Lily left?”
“Not yet. I haven’t gotten to that part. But I promise that I’ll tell you when I do.” I lay my hand over Beatrice’s soft weathered one. It seems little enough to promise an old woman after upsetting her.
I walk back to Main Street, noticing that the carved relief in the gable of the Queen Anne is gone. Without the placid face of the goddess the house looks strangely forlorn, even though it has acquired a few more yards of sky blue paint. There’s still no sign of the housepainter, making the progress seem as if it had been done by helpful elves. When I enter the Rip van Winkle Diner, though, I find my housepainter. Not an elf at all, but Sheriff Reade in sky blue paint–splattered T-shirt and faded jeans. I hesitate, wondering if I should join him in his booth. He seems happily engaged in a book and it’s not as if we exactly hit it off on the two occasions that we’ve met.
But when he looks up from his book and sees me, he breaks into a smile so spontaneous that it would seem rude to ignore him.
“Mind if I join you?” I ask.
“Not at all,” he says, laying the book facedown.
I glance at it, but the front cover is ripped and the spine too creased to read the title, so that conversational gambit is out. “You’ve been painting, I see,” I say, opting for the obvious. “You’re working on that Queen Anne on Maple Street?”
“That’s the one. How’d you know it’s a Queen Anne?”
“The spindle work, the half-timbering on the front gable, the decorative shingles … and it’s the most common type of Victorian, so it’s a safe guess.”
He laughs. “Well, you’re right. It was built in 1885 by Eliphalet Nott, who ran the town newspaper back when there was one. Sadly, the Nott family lost all their money in the Great Depression and the house hasn’t had a fresh coat of paint, a window caulked, or floor varnished since then. The roof needs reshingling and there’s water damage in the basement.”
“But it has great bones,” I say. “Are you planning on living there?”
“Me? I’d rattle around in there like bones in a casket. It’s an investment property. I’m fixing it up to sell to some likely couple from the city. Since Nine-Eleven there’s been a steady influx of New Yorkers moving up here.”
“I’m surprised that the town sheriff has the time to do all that work. There must not be a lot of crime in the area—”
I’m interrupted by the appearance of the waitress, who refills the sheriff’s iced tea without asking and asks me what I’d like. I order a grilled cheese with tomato, iced tea, and a slice of apple pie.
“Are you Doris?” I ask. “Your cousin Dymphna said to try the apple pie.”
“She would,” the woman says, shaking her head so that her pink cheeks wobble. “She bakes ’em.”
“I guess Dymphna’s moonlighting,” I say to Sheriff Reade when Doris leaves.
“Most of the folks around here do more than the one job,” he says. “It’s not easy to make ends meet, and I doubt the school pays Dymphna what she’s worth. Maybe you teachers do better.”
“No … I mean, I was glad to get anything, considering I hadn’t worked since college and I don’t have my certification or Ph.D. yet, but the salary is low compared to other schools. I figured it was because Arcadia is relatively new. It hasn’t had the time to acquire a big endowment.”
“Vera Beecher left the school very well endowed. It’s just that Ivy St. Clare is stingy. Since it’s the biggest employer in the area—practically the only employer—she can get away with paying the locals low wages. Sometimes I think that St. Clare’s taken the medieval theme of the school to heart and believes we’re all her vassals. I’ve had to remind her a number of times that the Arcadia Falls Police Department is not a department of the Arcadia School and that I’m not in her employ.”
“She must not like you questioning the students, then.”
“No,” Reade says with a grin. He leans forward and lowers his voice. “She’s pressured me to have Isabel’s death declared an accident, but I’m not convinced that it was. Until I am, I’ll question anyone I think has information, including the students.”
“Like Chloe, you mean. She was very upset after you questioned her.”
He groans and shakes his head. “You make it sound like I water-boarded the poor kid—”
He’s interrupted by Doris Byrnes delivering my order. She gives me a suspicious look, clearly unhappy that I’ve annoyed the local sheriff, and puts my sandwich and pie plates down so hard they clatter on the linoleum surface of the table. When she leaves Reade leans back over the table.
“I knew Isabel Cheney a little,” he says. “She came into the station last year to interview me for a story she was writing for the school newspaper.” He breaks out in a grin at the memory, transforming his face from severe to handsome in an instant. “I felt like I was being interrogated by the CIA! She was very thorough—and very level-headed. I just don’t see her running willy-nilly into the woods and falling over the edge of a cliff.”
“You think Chloe Dawson pushed her?” I ask, appalled that a girl who’s spending so much time with my daughter is under police suspicion. “Isabel Cheney was nearly twice Chloe’s size.”
He swears under his breath and runs his hand through his hair—a habit I notice he has when he’s thinking. It makes his short blond hair stand up like dried pine needles, bristling with electricity. “That wouldn’t mean much if Chloe surprised her. I do know that there’s something she’s not telling me….” He stops and cocks his head at me. “Just like I know that there’s something you’re not telling me right now.”
“Me?” My voice comes out high and squeaky. The fact is that I have remembered something. “It’s nothing,” I prevaricate. “Just something Chloe said the night of the bonfire. But kids are always saying things like that—”
“Like what?”
I sigh. “She was angry that Isabel had told Dean St. Clare that she’d done all the work on their paper. She said she had a plan to get even with Isabel.”
“And you didn’t think this was worth telling me when Isabel showed up dead the next day?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I honestly didn’t remember it until now.”
He makes a disgusted noise and gets up. “Do me a favor,” he says, peeling a few bills out of his wallet and laying them on the table. “The next time you have information about a murder investigation, come and see me right away. Okay?”
I nod numbly as he walks out of the diner. I had no idea that Isabel’s death was being treated as a murder. I push away the half-eaten apple pie, my appetite spoiled. How can I keep Sally at a school where a girl was murdered? Should I leave? But go where?
I leave the diner in a haze and start toward my car, but I’m not ready to go back to the campus. Instead I wander into the first store I see—the little New Agey gift shop, Seasons. I’m greeted by the sounds of clattering bamboo, running water, and birdsong, as if I’d stepped into a Buddhist meditation garden. The store is dim after the bright sunny street, the sunlight filtered through colorful madras curtains. When my eyes adjust I realize that the sounds are coming from a recording. There’s no bamboo grove, although there is a bamboo curtain screening an alcove full of crystals, candles, and books. At first I don’t notice the saleswoman behind the counter. The kurta she wears blends in with the wall hanging behind her as do her short, pixie-cut sandy hair and freckled skin. She sits still as a baby deer gone to ground. When I make eye contact, she presses her hands together in front of her chest and inclines her head in my direction, but she still doesn’t speak. I smile and step through the bamboo curtain into a dimly lit alcove lined with books. Celtic Wisdom, I read from one spine; Making Magic with Gaia is another. While my back is turned, I hear the door open and a burst of laughter and loud teenage voices disrupt the bamboo-grove quiet.
“Chloe said we had to get the candles here,” one of the girls says. The voice is familiar, but I can’t at first place it.
“If you ask me, Chloe’s gotten pretty damn bossy. Ever since she got picked to play the goddess, she thinks she is one. I think we should let someone else play the goddess for the equinox.”
The second voice is also familiar. I half turn, shielding my face with a copy of Seasons of the Witch to get a look at the two girls. It’s Hannah Weiss and Tori Pratt—an unlikely pairing even though I knew they hang out with Chloe. Tori is a type familiar to me from my years in Great Neck: a preening queen bee, groomed within an inch of her life from her artificially straightened hair to her pedicured toes (visible now in flip-flops). She’s the one complaining about not getting her turn to be goddess.
“I just don’t buy Chloe’s argument that it has to be the same goddess for the whole cycle.”
“You do have a point,” Hannah, who’s wearing a plaid flannel jumper, orange tights, and corduroy Mary Janes, says, “It is a cycle. That means it doesn’t have a beginning or an end.”
I have to give Hannah points for Geometry 101, but it still strikes me as passing strange that these girls are arguing not about a part in a play or getting to be prom queen but assuming the role of goddess in a pagan rite.
“Well, tell that to Chloe. She thinks that since Isabel died it means she was a real pagan sacrifice and so the cycle is really charged or something.”
“That’s sick, Tori.”
“Maybe, but I’m not going to be the one to tell Chloe that, especially now with her insisting we have the equinox thing on the ridge. She might push me off this time.”
“Don’t say that! Chloe didn’t push Isabel off the cliff.”
“How do you know? Were you there?” When Hannah shakes her head Tori goes on.
“You know how mad she was at Isabel for getting her in trouble with the Dean. And she always gets what she wants. Look at how she’s got Clyde wrapped around her little finger, and she’s got that new girl eating out of her hand. I do have an idea for cutting her down to size, though.” Tori bends down toward Hannah and lowers her voice. I lean forward in my alcove to hear her above the tinkling of wind chimes and recorded water music, but I miss whatever she says.
“No way!” Hannah replies. “I’m afraid she’d put a curse on me. Let’s just get this over with, okay?”
The girls approach the counter where the proprietor looks up at them placidly, seemingly oblivious to the girls’ conversation and my eavesdropping. “Um, excuse me?” Tori says. “We have a list of things we need. Can you help us?”
“We don’t sell curses,” the saleswoman replies. Apparently she had been listening after all.
“Well, good, because we don’t need any,” Tori snips back. “We’re supposed to get twelve candles, six brown and six white, each blessed for the …” She consults a folded sheet of notepaper. “… blessed for the ritual of the autumn equinox. Have you got any of those?”
The saleswoman turns wordlessly and disappears behind the Indian wall hanging. Something thuds, creaks, then crashes. I stay in my alcove, hoping the girls will continue their conversation. I suspect the “new girl” they mentioned is Sally and I’m also curious about Tori’s plans to cut Chloe “down to size.” I’m worried, too, that Chloe wants to have the equinox celebration on the ridge. It’s the first I’ve heard of that. But the girls wait in silence until the saleswoman returns with an armful of candles and glass canisters. “You’ll want these herbs to go with the candles,” she says.
“We don’t want any such thing,” Tori announces. “Here’s our list.” She holds the sheet of paper an inch from the saleswoman’s nose. “See, it says twelve candles. We’re not here to buy anything else.”
“The herbs are free,” the saleswoman says. “They come with the candles.”
“Oh, in that case, sure. We’ll take them.”
The saleswoman scoops out some dried yellow flowers into a brown paper bag. “Marigold petals,” she says, “to stand for the dying sun. Ring these around your white candles.” She scoops some dried seed pods into another bag. “Then strew these around the brown candles.” Hannah peers into the canister the seeds came from.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Poppy husks. That’s for the dark, which you’re welcoming.”
“Poppies? Isn’t that where opium comes from?”
“Yes,” the saleswoman replies, with a small smile. “Don’t eat them.”
“Have you got any eye of newt?” Tori asks, starting to laugh. A look from the saleswoman suddenly silences her. Hannah hands over the money for the candles and herbs, grabs Tori’s arm, and pulls her out of the shop. I can hear Tori’s shrill laughter exploding on the street and her clear exclamation: “Jeez, did you think she was going to turn us into toads?”
I approach the counter holding up a copy of The Meaning of Witchcraft by Gerald Gardner. “Would you recommend this book?” I ask the saleswoman as she closes the glass canisters and brushes some dried chaff from the countertop. An acrid smell rises to my nose and makes me sneeze.
“May the Goddess bless you,” she says, handing me a Kleenex. “And yes, I can recommend that book quite highly. Gerald Gardner is the father of modern Wicca.” She squints at me. “You’re a teacher,” she says—a statement, not a question.
I nod my head.
“So you’ll want to approach the subject in a rational, scholarly way.” She smiles at me as if she’d just identified an endearing but eccentric character trait in an old friend. “Come with me.”
When she comes out from behind the counter I see why there’d been so much noise in the back room. Her left leg is in a metal brace and she’s learning heavily on a carved wooden cane. “You’ll want Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and Vivianne Crowley’s book on Wicca. Vivianne has a doctorate in psychology from the University of London. That should be enough scholarly cred for you.”
“Do you think I’m some academic snob who won’t listen to anyone who doesn’t possess a degree?”
The woman laughs, which makes the lines around her eyes crinkle. She’s older than I thought at first. In her thirties, not her twenties. Instead of answering my question she switches her cane to her left hand. I notice that the handle is carved into the shape of a leaping deer. She holds out her hand to shake. “I’m Fawn, by the way.”
“Meg Rosenthal,” I say, shaking her hand. I find myself grinning as if we were sharing some private joke. “How did you know I was a teacher?”
“The way you were hiding from those girls,” she says, limping back to the counter with the books she’s chosen for me. “You didn’t want them to see you, and I think you were interested in what they were talking about.” She lifts one tawny eyebrow.
“I was,” I admit. I have a feeling that lying to this woman would be pointless. “There was a death at the school last month.”
“I know. That poor girl. She had come in here a few times.”
“Really? I wouldn’t have pegged Isabel Cheney as being interested in witchcraft.”
“I doubt anyone would peg you for that, either,” she says, ringing up my books and taking the bills I offer. I’m about to tell her that my interest is purely scholarly, but that would only confirm her initial impression of me as a snob.
“So what was she interested in, then?” I ask.
“She started coming in last year for charms to help her in school. She was very ambitious but sadly unsure of herself under her confident pose. When she came back to school this term, though, she had a lot of questions about local traditions. She told me it was for a paper she was writing.”
“What kind of traditions was she interested in?”
“She wanted to know about the legends surrounding the clove and the woods above it, specifically about the wittewieven—who’s supposed to haunt those woods.”
Callum Reade had told me about the wittewieven the first night I met him. I wonder if he learned of it through Fawn … maybe he and Fawn … I silence the next thought and ask Fawn what she had told Isabel.
“It was a very old legend that went back to the days of the first Kingston settlement. A woman named Martha Drury was accused of being a witch. Rather than be hanged, she fled Kingston into the mountains. She settled in the clove, where she gained a reputation for being a healer—or, as some might say, a witch. After she died, people claimed to see a white shape hovering over the falls and said it was the ghost of Martha Drury. That’s how the clove got to be called Witte Clove. Wittewieven means ‘white woman,’ but it also means ‘wisewoman’—a healer, an herbalist—and as I told Isabel many people around here believe that if you enter the clove with a pure heart you will be protected and healed. I think she must have run there because I told her that.”
I’m silent for a moment, then say, “It doesn’t seem like the spirit of the white woman was able to protect her.”
“No,” Fawn says, handing me my bag. “Which makes me wonder what she was running from.”